Hand-held, motor-driven epilators have become increasingly popular in recent years. Such epilators generally comprise pairs of cooperating clamping discs or other mechanisms for extracting hairs from skin.
Epilation can be quite a painful procedure. However, it has been found that the pain can be significantly reduced by stimulating nerves in the skin immediately before, during or immediately after the extraction of hairs from the skin. Today, a multiplicity of epilators having a massage, vibration or other pain-reducing device are available. Such devices can be passive, or they can be actively driven by a motor, e.g. by the motor which also drives the clamping discs. In the latter case, separate drive trains or motion converters are usually employed for driving the clamping discs and for driving the pain-reducing device. However, separate drive trains and motion converters take up extra space, which may inhibit particularly compact and appealing designs.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,123,713 describes an epilator having a hair plucking assembly and a vibrating assembly adjacent to the hair plucking assembly, wherein an eccentric cylinder is mounted to a drive gear. The eccentric cylinder has an axis of rotation that is off-set from its geometric centre such that rotation of the drive gear lifts and lowers the vibrating head relative to the axis of rotation.
It is an object of the invention to provide an epilator having a pain-reducing element that is drivable by a particularly compact driving mechanism. This object is achieved by the characteristic feature of the independent claim. Further specifications and specific embodiments are outlined in the dependent claims.